


New Skies, New Stars

by Snickfic



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Chastity Device, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hand Jobs, Loss of Virginity, Marriage of Convenience, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, POV Brunnhilde | Valkyrie (Marvel), Past Brunnhilde | Valkyrie/Blonde Valkyrie, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Second marriage, Space Stations, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:34:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25538128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: Once upon a time, Odin put a chastity spell on his second child—neither his second nor his child, but no matter, apparently—to be broken by Loki's spouse on his wedding night. Too bad Odin never got around to finding Loki that spouse.“So you want me to marry you and help you fulfill the binding,” Val said. Fuck, he’d never gotten off in his life. Explained a lot, really.
Relationships: Brunnhilde | Valkyrie/Loki (Marvel)
Comments: 41
Kudos: 170
Collections: Just Married Exchange 2020





	New Skies, New Stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



“I need to speak with you,” said Loki, after what had already been quite a long council meeting, at the end of quite a long day. Val had flown a freight hauler’s worth of supplies up from Earth, helped unload the perishables—the construction materials could wait—and tried to stay awake through the meeting, though she hadn’t tried particularly hard.

“I want to shower,” she told Loki, “and then I want to sleep. If this is about another one of your plays—”

“It’s not,” Loki said.

He was mostly helpful these days. He’d just pointed out a fatal flaw in Thor’s festival plan that saved Val from having to do it. He probably wasn’t fucking with her, at least not at this very instant. Val heaved a sigh and crossed her arms. “Well?”

“Somewhere private,” Loki said.

That pricked Val’s curiosity enough that she let him follow her back to her quarters: her own quarters, shared with no one. Truly she’d practically arrived in Valhalla. The door slid shut behind them as doors ought, none of that swinging and banging Earth was so fond of, and none of those weird opening-iris things that the Grandmaster had had a taste for. Just a nice slide open, slide shut. 

Val picked up a bottle of Earth’s whiskey that she’d brought up on the freighter and took a swig, and then she pointed the glass mouth in Loki’s direction and said, “Well?”

“Well,” he said, but then nothing followed after that.

“I could be taking that shower right now,” Val said.

Loki heaved a sigh, as though she was being very unreasonable. He fixed his gaze on her rug—an Earth import that her toes sank into—and said, “I have a favor to ask.”

“Okay,” Val said slowly. “What the hell is it?”

“I’d like you to marry me,” Loki said. At Val’s stare, he added, “Only briefly. A single night. It wouldn’t really be marriage in any meaningful sense, more of a—” He paused and caught her eye, searching her gaze as if he’d find some help there. Apparently concluding very fucking rightly that he wouldn’t, he said, “A tryst.”

“A what.”

He was scowling now. “You’re aware, of course, that I’m a secondborn of the royal house of Asgard. Not that any part of that is actually true, as it turns out, but I was raised under that misconception, and so—” 

“Fuck,” Valkyrie said. Seriously: fuck. “I thought Asgard was supposed to be all civilized now. No more of the conquering and the selling latterborns off in political marriages.”

Loki gave her a rictus smile. “Consider me the last vestige of an older tradition. And my fa—and Odin took all necessary measures to protect my value as a marriage prospect.”

So Odin had bound up his second child—neither his second nor his child, but no matter, apparently—in a chastity spell, to be broken only on Loki’s wedding night by his new spouse. Val remembered it being a popular practice in some of the other realms, Vanaheim and Alfheim, but their people lived shorter lives than those of Asgard, and their traditions changed faster. Very probably the last recipient of an old-fashioned chastity spell was the one standing in her quarters, watching warily for her reaction.

“So you want me to marry you and help you fulfill the binding,” she said. Fuck, he’d never gotten off in his life. Explained a lot, really.

Loki dipped his chin in agreement. “We would of course dissolve the marriage after. There’s no commitment implied.”

That was a tidy solution to the basic problem of having to get married in the first place, but Val still had some burning questions, such as, “Why me?”

Loki’s expression turned sullen. Despite maintaining his usual excellent posture, he somehow managed to convey the impression of hunched shoulders. “Why does a person generally invite another person to a tryst?”

Val blinked at him. His expression grew ever more sour, and his gaze slipped away from hers again. Val said, “You’ll have to excuse me, Highness, I missed you wanting to go to bed with me on account of all the scowling.”

“Never mind,” Loki said, already turning, but she caught his elbow. 

“I didn’t say no,” which was raised questions of its own, but she’d attend to those in a bit. Loki met her gaze, scowling still and obviously wishing he were anywhere other than here, now, having this conversation. Well, fair enough. “Look, let me have a think, all right? And I want to take fucking shower.”

“You are a bit pungent,” he said, expression lightening a little—because she hadn’t rejected him outright or because insulting her was just that much of a mood boost? Could go either way, honestly.

So after he’d shown himself out and Valkyrie’d shown herself into the shower (her very own, shared with _no one_ ), she thought about it. First: the hazard of making a mystically significant commitment to _Loki_ , however briefly. She couldn’t say she’d even been much impressed with magic, though. It succumbed to a blade more often than not, like anything else. What had Hela’s magic been, in the end? Just more blades.

Next: the prospect of whatever ceremony the marriage itself would require, no doubt necessarily presided over by Thor, to add a little bonus of exquisite awkwardness to the situation. Tedious, she concluded, but not a deciding factor. It wasn’t as though the vows would carry any real weight, not like—

Val moved swiftly past that thought.

Finally: Loki naked. Loki’s equally naked prick, which had thus far in life missed out on what Valkyrie judged were probably all the best parts of being a prick. There was very little appeal to putting her hands on the Loki that’d just been standing stiffly in her quarters, no matter how many or few his clothes, but the Loki who sat in council meetings calling Thor an idiot and muttering pointed asides only she could hear—she enjoyed that one sometimes. And the one that met her very occasionally on the mat in the station’s new training room, who fought dirty and bitter and always ended the bout staring up at her in disbelief mingled with—

Well. She’d interpreted it as “awe,” which she’d found amusing, but given the conversation that’d just happened, “desire” was probably truer. 

Hmm.

* * *

Val found Loki in the library the next day, poring over a book spread open on the only table. There were more books behind him, stacked on the shelves. Each one had been clutched in some trembling hand or stowed away in a knapsack when Asgard had evacuated. As far as Val knew, Loki was meant to be scanning them into the station’s database for future preservation, not reading them. Well, that wasn’t Val’s lookout. 

“I’ll do it,” she told Loki, without preamble.

“Oh,” he said, blinking at her, visibly pulling himself out of the pages. “Oh,” he said again, as understanding dawned. He folded his hands. “Thank you.”

Who’d have thought Loki would be so polite about, well, anything? “Yeah, but I have a condition.”

“Oh?” Loki said warily.

“Yeah. There’s steps and stuff, right, that you have to do for the ceremony? Or Thor has to do, I guess. It’ll take a bit of time, yeah?”

“A week or so, once I give him the word.”

Now that’d be a hell of a conversation. “Right. So before we get married—” What a fucking weird thing to have coming out of her mouth, however meaningless it was. “—I want a practice run. You and me and a bed and no clothes.”

“Like a test,” Loki ventured. He looked deflated, like his hopes were already dashed. 

Val admitted to herself that partly she was doing this because she felt bad for him. Loki was so reliably obnoxious; seeing him off-balance like this felt wrong, and she’d just as soon set the universe back to rights as soon as possible. “ _Not_ a test. Just—practice. If it’s up to me to get you off for the first time in your entire life, I’d like us to know each other a little better first, without anyone’s future fucking capabilities on the line.” 

He should get to enjoy his wedding night. Wedding nights were supposed to be fun. Everyone was supposed to be a little drunk, and you were supposed to see someone in your bed you’d seen lots of times before and were going to see there many, many times again, someone dear to you—

Not that that was true for her and Loki. Anyway.

“Oh,” Loki said, in a new tone—cautious, but hopeful. “All right.”

* * *

Val took her shower early that night, and she shoved the pile of clean clothes off the bunk, so there’d be something to lie on. She gave about a half a second’s thought to what one wore to the dress rehearsal of one’s wedding night and decided the answer was pajamas: comfortable, easy for Loki to get her out of. 

He buzzed her door at the appointed hour. She let him in, and when the door had slid shut behind him, she took a moment to stand back and look her fill. Despite all his complaints about Earth, he’d apparently grown fond of their fashion. Tonight it was trousers and a shirt with buttons. They looked good on him. Val stepped in close enough to smell the freshly-washed scent of him and see that he’d shaved. 

It all boded pretty well, she thought, even if Loki was standing stiff as a board. “Relax,” Val said, slipping her hand in his. “It’s gonna be fun, right?” She gave his fingers a squeeze. Cautiously he squeezed back and then immediately flushed. 

Norns help her, it was cute. “C’mere,” she said. She tugged him close and tipped her face up, and after a pause he obediently bent just enough to put his lips on hers. For a moment he just stood there and let her press kisses to his mouth, and then she licked teasingly at his lips and he shuddered, minutely but with his entire body. Aha. Val licked along his lips again, and he opened with a gasp. “Like this,” Val murmured, and then demonstrated for him. “You’re tasting, not eating. Not too much spit.”

“I’ve kissed people before,” he said, stiffening again.

Not very many of them, Val would wager, and probably not for a long time. “Well, now I’m telling you how to kiss _me_ ,” she said, which seemed to mollify him.

It didn’t take him too long to get the hang of it, and he obviously liked it, judging from his occasional shudder. Eventually she realized that his hands were flexing uncertainly at his sides, lifting once in a while in an aborted motion. Val gave his hip a squeeze. “You can touch me,” she said.

Cautiously his hands landed on her shoulders. He thumbed at the straps of her tank top and then worked inward until he was stroking up and down her neck. 

For the moment distracted from kissing, Loki brushed her hair away from her ear and stroked a cautious finger around the curve of it. He palmed her shoulders, swept his hands down her triceps. As always, he was a little cool to the touch—that Jotun blood winning out, she supposed, even through Odin’s bone-deep illusion. He brushed his palms down her sides, over the tank top. His hands were shaking a little as they closed over her hips.

It was all a bit too gentle for Val’s usual tastes, a bit overly polite, but the utter fixedness of Loki’s gaze as he slipped his fingers under the hem of her shirt, the full strength of his attention as he brushed his fingers over her skin—that was pretty hot. “You can take it off me,” Val suggested.

With glacial care, Loki tugged her tank top up her raised arms and over her head. She hadn’t worn anything underneath. Ever so cautiously, Loki brushed his thumb over a nipple. Val gave him a few moments to appreciate her breasts— _she_ appreciated a good set of them, so she sympathized with the impulse—and then she began to unbutton his shirt.

Loki froze. “Oh,” he said, with something like alarm. His expression transmuted into that scowl that was she coming to learn was in fact a very flimsy disguise. Val dropped her hands, and for a moment they just looked at each other. Somehow she hadn’t expected him to be shy, but maybe she should have, considered how many layers he seemed to prefer to wear. “I suppose I must,” Loki said at last. He began to undo the buttons.

With a beginning like that, Val was half-expecting him to be blue underneath it all, or horribly scarred, or—she wasn’t even sure what. But in fact when he opened the shirt and then removed it, he looked entirely ordinary, exactly what she’d have expected: pale, nicely muscled, sparsely haired. She put a hand to his chest. His expression had turned again; now he just looked worried.

“You’ll do,” Val said neutrally, and Loki exhaled in visible relief. Hadn’t he ever been naked with someone before? There were a lot of things a person could do without getting off. Val brushed her thumb across his nipple. “Does that feel good?”

“I—don’t know.”

It was high time Val asked some questions she’d been putting off. “So how does the binding work, exactly? Does _anything_ feel good?” Would he even know what she meant by that? “When you touch yourself—your prick, I mean—is that nice?”

Loki grimaced. “It all feels faraway or—or unfocused? Dispersed? I can’t become aroused, not like you’d think of it. I can’t show interest.” That scowl had come out again. Val was starting to find it a little painful to look at. She took his hand and leaned up, and after a pause, he obliged her with a kiss. 

Kissing was safe; kissing was something Loki knew, now. He returned to touching her, and finally Val let herself begin to brush her hands over his arms, his ribs. She found out he was ticklish when she trailed her fingers just above his belt and he tried to squirm away. She grabbed him by the waistband and held him firmly in place. 

He inhaled sharply. When she looked up, his eyes were dark with—well, with _interest_ , never mind what his prick was or wasn’t doing. She’d seen that same looking on him plenty of times when they sparred. She’d just figured it meant something else. 

“Come on,” Val said. “I want to get you on that bed now.” She shoved him lightly, and obediently he went, until he lost his balance at the last moment and flopped gracelessly onto his back on the bunk. Val laughed and crawled on top of him, and after a moment he smiled, too—a little bit shy, a little uncertain, but a healthy-looking expression nonetheless. Then Val settled in properly on his hips, and he sucked in another breath. 

That called for more kissing. Loki was shuddering with more regularity now, his breath coming heavier. Then he gasped, “Please. Please stop.”

Val froze. When no further instruction seemed forthcoming, she sat up, still straddling him. “All right?”

Loki threw an arm over his eyes. “Yes, but I can’t—I want— _Fuck_.”

Well, that answered some more questions about how the spell worked. Now she felt a little sorry for winding him up. It’d been so much fun, though. “I guess that’s why we’re getting married, eh?”

“More or less.”

“And why you never bothered much with kissing or anything before, either.”

Loki nodded, his eyes still hidden under his arm. The unhappy twist of his mouth was clearly visible, though.

Val didn’t want to leave things there. Also, she didn’t want them to _both_ end the night unsatisfied. That’d just be sad. “You ever fucked a woman with your fingers?”

There was a pause. Loki peeked out from under his arm. “No,” he said cautiously, but his eyes were bright with interest.

They repositioned themselves. Val rolled onto her back, wedging her elbow under her head to give her a view. Loki was almost as cautious slipping her pants off as he’d been removing his own shirt. He approached the task with furrowed brow and narrow-eyed focus. He hooked his fingers in the waistband of her underwear and tugged those down, too. 

She kept a full bush down there. She’d never really gotten the appeal of shaving or waxing or whatever the hell; she preferred her pain a little farther from her sensitive bits. Loki brushed his knuckles against the hair. “You want a look?” Val asked.

Loki nodded. Val bent her knees and planted her feet wide. If she’d ever been shy, which she frankly didn’t remember, she’d had a few millennia of to get over it; still, there was something a little disconcerting about Loki’s silent, concentrated attention as he peered between her legs. She felt a cautious touch on her clit. “Look in the wall drawer,” Val said. “There’s lube in there.”

Loki found the button in the wall, like the one in his own quarters, and pressed it. A drawer rolled out. Loki plucked the lube out of it. Val directed him through the process of putting some on his fingers and massaging her clit. It was hard to tell if he was enjoying any of it. Mostly he looked worried. Finally, when her blood heated to a steady, pleasurable throb under his fingers, she talked him through putting a couple of fingers in her. She put her hand on herself then.

“Are you—?”

“I’m close, yeah. Keep doing what you’re doing.”

He did, but his attention hard turned to her face now. He watched her with a startling kind of hunger. And then she stopped worrying about that, because she could feel release just one moment away, one touch of the right kind—there. She shut her eyes and rode it out with Loki’s fingers buried in her.

“Fuck,” she breathed at last. She squinted at Loki. “Not bad.”

Loki exhaled heavily. Val reached out and patted his knee, the closest part of him within reach. Slowly he withdrew his fingers and held them to his nose, and then, to Val’s delight, he cautiously licked one. His expression did not betray any kind of opinion about the flavor. “Next time you can eat me out if you want,” Val said.

Loki hummed something that sounded more like agreement than not.

It’d been a heavy day. Val had just come. She let her eyes drift shut.

* * *

Much later, drowsily, Val said, “I don’t get it.”

Loki’s hand stilled. He’d been stroking her back while she dozed, which was pleasant and kind of sweet, although probably not something she should expect a repeat of once he was capable of his own afterglow. “Oh?” he said, neutral, wary.

Val rolled over onto her back. Loki was sitting up, one foot under him. “The whole point of those spells was to save the person’s virtue for marriage, not to keep you—” She grimaced and gestured up and down him. “You know, indefinitely celibate. Unless you wanted that, but it seems like you don’t.”

Loki heaved a sigh. “As you said, marital alliances were already going out of fashion, and by the time I was of an age to be considering things like that, my—Odin felt secure in his power as it was. Mother negotiated a couple of proposals for me, Vanaheim nobles, a stateswoman of Alfheim, that sort of thing, but.” He lifted a shoulder and let it drop.

“But what? You didn’t like them?”

“Whether I _liked_ them was immaterial. I was a prince of Asgard, I wasn’t going to be fobbed off on some second rate member of nobility on another world. I was second in line for a _throne_ , I—” Loki cut himself off and looked away. “Except I wasn’t, really. I suppose it’d have been inconvenient if my new spouse had discovered I wasn’t even of the race they’d supposed, much less of the royal house of Asgard they thought they’d married into.”

“Inconvenient,” Val repeated.

Loki’s snort of laugher had no mirth in it. “After I found out, I wondered that Father didn’t give me in marriage to a frost giant. Surely that would have tied off a lot of loose ends very neatly.”

There was nothing Val could say to that. Of Odin’s children, really the wonder was that Thor seemed to have turned out as cheerful as he had, even with the missing eye. “So why now?”

“Hm?” Loki said, still lost in his own grim thoughts. 

“Did you wake up yesterday morning and say to yourself, ‘You know what, I think I’d like to shag someone, guess I’ll get on that’?”

Loki laughed, but with humor this time. “I was too busy to think of it for a long time, trying to foil Father’s extremely premature plans to crown Thor king. Then I fell off the Bifrost, then I was busy trying to conquer Earth, then Father had me imprisoned, then I _was_ Father. I could hardly marry _myself_ off to a third party, even temporarily. I spent a lot of time trying to find a way to break the spell, but as usual with this kind of thing, the consequences promised to be—messy.” Loki grimaced, leaving Val an unpleasant moment to imagine what messiness might result from breaking a chastity spell. “And then I thought since the spell was partly tied to Asgard and with Asgard being so much space debris, perhaps the binding would dissolve on its own, but it seems Heimdall was right, Asgard _is_ a people, not a place. Damn him.”

“So…yes, basically. You woke up yesterday morning—”

“—and decided I wanted to—to shag someone, yes.”

The word sounded awkward in his mouth. It was cute. “And how’s that working out?”

“All right so far.”

“Good,” Val said, letting Loki see her smile. The careful smile he gave in return was almost as good as the orgasm.

* * *

Thor took Val aside the next day to inform her that Loki had said she’d agreed to marry him and to find out whether this was in fact the case. “I’d forgotten about that old charm,” Thor said, when she asked him if he knew what the marriage was for. She didn’t want him getting any illusions about what kind of a match this was. “Loki told me years ago that he’d broken it. He lied, it seems.”

“Hmm,” Val said, and they shared a moment’s silent communion on the unsurprising nature of this development. 

The wedding, such as it was, would be in five days’ time. They’d need witnesses. Thor suggested Heimdall and Korg, which Loki had agreed to. They suited Val fine. Thor said, “I believe Loki has some items that you’ll want to perform some rites with, in preparation.”

Ugh, magic. But Thor was right: Loki approached Val in the gym with a little linen pouch bound up with some kind of half-dried herb. He gave her instructions for what to do with it in great and tedious detail, which suggested that maybe her feelings about magic had been evident on her face at some point.

When he was finally finished, Val said, “Hey, you know, we could practice more if you wanted.”

He eyed her suspiciously. “Would this practice be for my benefit or yours?”

“Oh, mine, mostly.” 

She knew it was the right answer from the way he brightened. It was even true. She hadn’t bedded anyone since Sakaar, and Loki was more work than she often put into a shag, but also more rewarding, in his own way. “Tonight?” Loki suggested.

“Tonight,” Val agreed.

* * *

Val spent a pleasant evening teaching Loki the fine art of eating her out. A good time was had by all. It was very kind of her, really, both for his sake and the sake of any pussies he encountered intimately in the future. 

When she’d shooed him out again, she got out the little pouch. Inside were more herbs, fully dried this time, and a tiny vial of oil. Their odor were sharp and pungent, medicinal. Familiar, if memories millennia old counted—more evidence of an older tradition than one Asgard operated on these days. Loki must have cultivated these in the station’s hydroponic garden, which meant he’d given this temporary marriage more than two days of thought. 

She ground the herbs between her fingers, moistened them with the oil, and then put a few flakes on her tongue and more along her clit. The concoction stung a little, which Loki’d warned her of. There were words to say, too. “I’m no good with magic,” she’d told Loki, and he’d assured her that words and intent would be enough.

So Val sat in her quarters, she said the words, and thought very hard about Loki, his sharp eyes and sharp tongue and the magic that sparked from his fingers. She thought of his pale, bare chest and the faint dark trail of hairs down the center of it, and of his prick, which she’d not yet seen except as an incidental topographical feature of his trousers. She thought of those shudders when she kissed him just right, his fingers pressing carefully into her. His intent, focused gaze.

All at once she returned to herself, though she hadn’t realized until that moment that she’d gone anywhere. She was out of breath, and all the stinging places had gone numb—temporarily, Loki had assured her.

Val sniffed her fingers, where traces of that pungence remained. With it came the realization, gut-deep: she was marrying Loki Odinson. She was _marrying_ him.

* * *

The next day, Val found Loki in the same chair in the library, though the book looked different. It was afternoon, after a fashion; the station was at the place in its rotation where sunlight slanted into the library’s narrow rectangular window. Val dropped into the chair across from Loki and said, “I’ve been married before.”

Loki blinked at her. 

“She died at Hela’s hand,” Val said. “She saved my life. You saw it, when you—when you jammed your ruddy fingers into my mind and dragged my memories out.”

It was quiet for a bit. Val listened to the uncertain creak of the station itself, a vast lattice of steel and forgery and magic still coming to terms with its new shape. She watched a dust mote wander through the sunbeam. “I’m sorry for that,” Loki said at last.

“Yeah.” Probably he was. This far from Sakaar, he seemed less desperate, less prone to reaching for pain as a weapon. Then again, so was she. “You called it a tryst. That’s how I was thinking of it, you know—a favor, like you said. Not really a marriage.”

“And now?” Loki asked carefully. 

“Oh, I’ll still do it. I said I would.”

“But?”

Val looked away, to the wall of books. Some of their ends were stamped with words so old even her Allspeak couldn’t make sense of them. “After she died, I promised her—or myself, I guess—I promised I wouldn’t do it again.”

“Get married?” Loki asked. 

“ _Care_ ,” Val said.

Loki considered this with a pinched expression. At last, he said, “It is very inconvenient, caring.”

“Yeah,” Val said.

They sat there for a while longer in silence before Val shoved to her feet. “Right. I’m gonna go punch something in the gym until it breaks.” Thor might squawk a little about that, but Val was the one who’d have to fetch the replacement for whatever it was, so he could just deal.

* * *

The day drew ever nearer, and the days in between were filled with the usual business (council meetings, two more freight runs to Earth) and the unusual (sourcing something to wear that was suitable for being married in, however informal a marriage it was). Beyond the most practical of preparations, Val didn’t think much about what was to come. She didn’t think about Ingeborg at all, not her blue eyes or the tug of her braids in Val’s hand, not how easily she flushed or how deep.

In that time, Val barely saw Loki. He had his own duties and pastimes on the station, of course, and she was staying well away from the library. There was nothing strange about it. Then Thor called a council meeting, the day before the wedding ceremony was to take place, and Loki looked perfectly normal, like they’d never been avoiding each other at all.

Val caught him afterwards. She lifted her chin. “You coming to mine tonight?”

Loki gave her a long look. “If you like.”

It should have been fine. Loki was nothing like Ingeborg, with his dark hair and unfreckled skin, his near-supernatural ability to take offense at nearly anything. She hadn’t even married him yet. There was no resemblance at all, no reason for Val’s throat to tighten in the middle of kissing a trail down the middle of his chest. She stilled, swallowing hard.

“Valkyrie?” Loki said.

Her breath hitched. 

“Valkyrie, are you—”

“Fuck _off_ ,” Val said, sitting up. Her eyes were hot, on the verge of spilling over. “Don’t fucking move,” she told him. She crawled off the bunk, walked into the refresher, and spoke the door shut behind her. She washed her face with cool water. She took some deep breaths. She gave up and took a cold shower, where she could cry without anyone hearing her and all her tears would instantly be washed away. Also, the chill distracted her body pretty fast.

When she finally walked out again, Loki was still there on the bunk, where she’d told him to stay. She sat on the edge of the bunk and stared at her fuzzy Earth rug. 

“I could find someone else,” Loki said.

“Yeah?” Val said. Her voice was a little thick. She couldn’t really breathe through her nose. “Who’s your next choice, then?”

“I was going to ask Heimdall after you said no.”

She turned to regard him. “You were so sure I would?”

He’d mostly gotten past the scowling, even if he still didn’t care to meet her eyes when he confessed things like this. “You know how my dear brother is always going on about Valkyries?”

“Mm.”

“You must have realized by now that most living Asgardians hadn’t even heard of the Valkyrior until you showed up, and Thor is hardly an avid scholar. Who do you think learned enough about them to tell him? Why do you think he knew your vow-mark when he saw it?” Loki brushed his pale fingers over it now, up and down the inside of her arm, gently.

Ingeborg had liked to do the same. It was a wonder Val hadn’t gotten it burned off at some point a thousand or so years into her wanderings. Somehow she’d never quite gotten around to it. “Because his little brother had a crush?” Val suggested.

Loki huffed, his face turning slowly red. It really was pretty cute—an extremely unlikely description of Loki, she’d have said before all this started. “It seemed worth trying. And after you turned me down, I’d approach someone who might agree.”

“Your plans don’t work out all that often, do they?”

“I think this one worked quite well, actually, except for…” Loki trailed off, grimacing. “I’ll speak to Heimdall.”

“No fucking way. I’m not going to put all this work into you and then let the fucking Watcher reap the benefits. Fuck.” Sleeping with Loki was weird enough, but crying on him was worse. She scrubbed at her eye. “Look, I’ve already ruined the mood, you want a drink? It’s not a real wedding unless we show up hung over, anyway.”

Loki didn’t point out that it was not _meant_ to be a real wedding. He said, “Gods, yes.”

* * *

The ceremony was in Thor’s quarters for reasons he did not explain. Val suspected they boiled down to _Private, but not anyplace where he might have to imagine Loki and Val fucking immediately thereafter_. His quarters were nice, appointed a bit more like she remembered royal Asgardian chambers looking than her own did. There was room enough for the entire wedding party, too, an important factor.

Heimdall and Korg wore their ordinary clothes, though Korg had brought a bouquet of rather spindly-looking blossoms Val recognized from the station garden. He handed the bouquet to Val, who handed it smoothly to Loki, who for some reason held onto it with a little smile, instead of scowling and huffing and putting it aside as she’d meant him to do.

Val wore a tunic and trousers she’d borrowed from one of the trainees in the new Valkyrie corps. They were nicer than anything she had other than the Valkyrie armor, and she wasn’t wearing that. Loki looked—very good. He’d tied back his hair, and he was in Earth clothes again, trousers and a shirt with a collar and buttons. When she caught sight of him, he slanted her a look like he knew exactly how her fingers itched to start undoing those buttons.

Damn, she did good work.

The ceremony was dull but short. Each member of the wedding party recited their ancient words at the right time. They were different words than Val remembered, a small mercy; apparently marriages to royals that also fulfilled binding charms needed a little more to them. Some more of those herbs got burnt, and Loki and Val each got to inhale (and choke on) the smoke. 

“May the Norns give you long life,” Thor said. 

That, Val remembered. Her captain had said the same words, and Val had kissed Ingeborg and fondled her golden breastplate just to hear the onlookers’ catcalls. Ingeborg had stood there very primly, allowing herself to be kissed, and then she’d bent to whisper something filthy in Val’s ear. Val hadn’t the first fucking idea, now, what it’d been.

But no one currently present seemed likely to cheer, and Loki was looking a little off-balance for reasons that presumably hadn’t anything to do with uncomfortable memories of previous weddings. There was no reason to tarry here. Val laced her fingers through his and told Thor, “We’ll be going now, your majesty.”

“Yes,” Thor agreed hastily. 

“Congratulations,” Korg said, beaming.

“Yeah,” Val said, and then they made their escape.

* * *

Val slid the door shut behind her and turned to find Loki standing in the center of her quarters looking stiff as a board—and not the kind of stiff they’d been doing all this for, either. Now that the moment had arrived, Val wasn’t entirely sure how to begin. “Well,” she said.

“Well,” Loki echoed.

The looked at each other a moment, and then Val heaved a sigh. “Fuck this. You married me, didn’t you?” She said this perfectly naturally, without any kind of hitch in her voice at all. She’d be fine, as long as she had Loki to focus on. “So fucking come over here and kiss me.”

Loki approached cautiously—caution for her this time, not for him. She wanted to be pissed about that, but she couldn’t, somehow; the unceasing spring of bitterness she’d drawn from so often seemed to have run dry. She stood quite still as Loki cupped her jaw and put his mouth to hers. 

_You’re tasting, not eating_ , she’d said, and so he was. He pressed kisses to her mouth, one after the other, and she let him. This close, she could smell his soap, something a little bit sharp, like an evergreen. She gripped his sides—firm enough not to tickle—and closed her eyes. For all the sham this marriage was, still it was just the two of them now, like any new-married couple with the night stretching out before them.

Val retreated a couple of inches and started to fumble Loki’s shirt buttons open. “I don’t understand why you wear these,” she grumbled. “What’s wrong with clasps, like normal people use? Don’t you just magic up most of your clothes anyway?” It took her most of the buttons to realize that Loki had frozen again. She looked up to that blank expression of his that was as clear as if he’d spelled all his feelings out in words. Val dropped her hands. “You want to finish?”

Wordlessly, Loki undid the rest of his buttons and put the shirt aside. He was familiar to her like this now. She’d explored the dip of his throat, the smooth ridges of his collar bone, that intriguing little trail of dark hair on his chest. She smiled up at him with that leer that made him brighten every time. He did now, accompanied by a light flush across his cheekbones.

She allowed the thought in for the first time: It was a fucking crime, what had been done to him. Prince or not, occasional pain in the arse or not, he didn’t deserve this. Nobody did. 

“What a fucking pair we are,” she said, and Loki snorted his agreement. “Your trousers now,” Val suggested. She still hadn’t seen inside them, and she was curious. Of course she was.

For a moment she thought Loki was going to balk. He hesitated, his hands resting on his belt. Then, without fanfare, he slipped the buckle open, unfastened the fastening, and slid the trousers off his hips. Underneath, his knit underwear was black and close-fitting. His prick was tucked up inside it—lax, judging from the present topography. “Can you show interest now?” Val asked carefully.

Loki cupped himself, frowning in concentration. “No,” he said presently, his voice rough with disappointment. “I think you have to do it.”

“Right, then. On the bed, eh?” She got Loki settled sitting on her bunk. The black material of his underwear made him look even more starkly pale everywhere else. Val knelt next to him and then, slowly and obviously, she brushed her palm over the tell-tale bulge. Loki took a sharp breath.

“Yeah?” Val asked. He nodded jerkily. She did it again, a sweeping motion up his prick. She thumbed over where she thought the head was and gave him a careful squeeze—there. He shifted perceptibly in her hand. 

“Oh,” Loki said. There was an odd note in his voice—presumably the note of a man who’d just gotten his first inkling of what, in addition to pissing, his prick might be good for. He cupped his hand over Val’s and squeezed cautiously and there, again, was another sign of a prick just beginning to plump.

“C’mere,” Val said. She cupped his jaw with her free hand and angled in, kept the other hand on his crotch, and set out to kiss and fondle him into readiness. It wasn’t difficult. Suddenly, with her lawfully wedded hand on him, he was as sensitive as a youth in the first flush of manhood. She licked into his mouth, and he shuddered; she brushed a thumb along his neck, and he shuddered then, too. And ever more he grew under her hand, hot and stiffly to attention, no longer lying politely flat inside his underwear.

He was close, Val judged. “We could take these off now,” she suggested, tugging at his waistband.

“Oh,” he said again, but it was different sort of word this time. “I suppose—that is—I would rather not, yet.”

“All right,” Val agreed smoothly. “How’d you feel about me putting my hand inside, then?”

He gave that a long moment’s thought. “If you like.”

 _You’re tasting, not eating_ , but after all this anticipation, there was something in Val very hungry to touch Loki at last, skin to skin. She swept her hand over his belly, slid inside the stretchy material of his underwear, and closed her fingers around him. He was blood-hot and silky to the touch, and his exhale was harsh against her shoulder. 

She paused, and Loki shook his head. “No, just get on with it. Please,” he added. He’d flushed deeply now, red and not entirely happy. “Could you—not watch?”

Val discovered that a shard of tenderness had worked its way into her heart without her noticing. Its point pressed painfully into something vital. She brushed a kiss against Loki’s cheekbone, and then she fixed her gaze over his shoulder—she could maybe do something about that row of empty bottles—and she set herself to bringing him off at last.

When Loki Odinson came for the first time in his life, he came almost silently, curling over himself with a sharp grunt. His come was hot on Val’s skin, although not, perhaps, quite as hot as another man’s. Afterwards, he didn’t move for a bit except for the gasping of his breath. Val allowed herself to look and found his hands fisted in her blanket.

Val drew her hand out. It was smeared with jizz, which she wiped on Loki’s underwear, half because he’d already come in them anyway and half to get a reaction. Loki huffed softly, but that was all. “You know,” Val said, “it’s all right if you didn’t like it much. Some people don’t. It also gets more fun with practice.”

“You’re a great believer in practice,” Loki said, with a spark of humor, which Val was glad to hear. “Might I use your shower?”

“Knock yourself out,” Val said.

She watched him go. His arse wasn’t bad.

She felt off-kilter. She rarely spent much time in her quarters without a clear purpose in mind, so she had little to distract her from thinking over the last few minutes. 

She ended up at her window. She’d known all Asgard’s stars, millennia ago, one of the less practical bits of Valkyrie training; now Asgard’s skies were new, a full twenty-four hours of stars as the station spun slowly through its cycle. A quarter of the sky was already collected into constellations in an ongoing collaboration between the folksayers and the children: the station’s oldest and youngest residents. 

It was stupid, probably, to learn these new night skies. The station was no golden realm; there was no promise of permanence here. Yet Val called up the current star chart, overlaid on the window, and discovered that the star-naming group had named some new ones since she’d looked last. She craned her neck and found the line of stars dubbed Gungnir, just now crawling into view.

Loki was taking quite a long while in the shower, long enough for Val to form some suspicions about what all he was doing in there. Finally, she heard the whir of the shower door opening behind her. She turned, and there was Loki, bare as a babe and standing very straight, perhaps to make up for the lack of clothes. His prick looked perfectly ordinary, despite vague fantasies Val had had. He had ordinary balls. He wasn’t even blue down there.

Val wished she had a bottle—something to hold, never mind to drink from. “So, you had enough, or you want to go again?”

“Perhaps in a bit,” he said, confirming the suspicions. Well, good for him. “I could return the favor?”

Val found herself turning back to the window. All that restless unease abruptly materialized as a lump in her throat. “Not just now,” she said. Her voice was thicker than she’d have liked; no doubt Loki would notice. Loki joined her at the window, a solid, grounding presence at her back. “Fuck,” she said, when the first tear spilled over. “It’s been a millennium since I cried over her. It must have been you, digging around in my head. You knocked it all loose.”

After a while of the sniffling, he said, “I could try to bury the memory again, if you like.”

“ _No_ ,” Val said, before she even had time to think. “No,” she repeated, because like hell she’d let Loki into her head a second time, much less to ‘try’ something, but the longer she considered it, the more she found that wasn’t the only reason. “It’s good to remember her, probably. I tried not to, before.”

Loki’s hand found its way to her shoulder. “Would you like to talk about her?”

Val turned to stare at him. “You want to spend your wedding night listening to your wife talk about _her_ wife?”

For the first time in a while, Loki’s gaze slid away. “If you like.”

He wasn’t all that great at the comforting thing. Somehow, that’s what made Val say, “All right.”

Loki didn’t seem concerned about putting on any clothing, so Val took hers off, too, her borrowed tunic and trousers, which she was glad to be rid of. They’d served their purpose, and now she didn’t want to look at them anymore. She and Loki curled up together in the bunk, him at her back where she didn’t have to look at him. She had a bottle to ease her tongue, a blanket to protect from chill, and Loki’s hand on her knee, squeezing encouragement every so often. 

She’d met Ingeborg when they joined the training corps, both still just girls. “She was obviously a noblewoman’s daughter,” Val said. “None of that was supposed to matter in the Valkyrior, but no one else could handle a steed like she could. No wonder, she was practically born on the back of one. Her swordsmanship was shit at first, though. I was always better at that.”

That hadn’t stopped Ingeborg offering to fight her in many a bout. It’d taken Val a year or more to realize what that furious gleam was in Ingeborg’s eye every time she lost. “So then I lured her out to Yggdrasil and kissed the hell out of her, and that cleared up a lot of things between us.”

“To _Yggdrasil_ ,” Loki repeated, scandalized.

“Yeah, that was the tone she took, too, but it was great for shagging. Or _trysts_ , if you like. Not a lot of visitors, and you could hide yourselves in one of those great folds in the trunk. Not a soul could see you there.”

Years later, it was Ingeborg who’d brought Val out to Yggdrasil again and offered her a binding chain, the kind one Valkyrie gave to another in marriage. Valkyries rarely bothered with marrying at all—what vow could they make to one another more sacred, more sure than those they’d already made?—but Ingeborg had never quite left those noblewoman roots behind her. 

“And then you were married,” Loki said quietly.

“Yeah.” Val sighed heavily. She hadn’t spared a thought for Ingeborg in decades. Certainly she hadn’t in the years she spent on Sakaar, which had seemed to stifle every memory, every reality except that which was directly in front of her eyes and under her feet. Even after Loki dragged her to the forefront of Val’s mind again, after she was surrounded by Asgardians, even in the past few days, it’d been far easier not to think of any of that.

The tide of feeling had come up on Val all at once, at the window; only now did she realize how gradually it gone out again, leaving her weary and washed out. “I don’t want to talk anymore.” 

What did she want?

She wanted to have a proper wedding night. She wanted to feel someone’s hands and mouth on her—she wanted to feel _Loki’s_ hands and mouth. She took a deep breath and said, “I think I’d like that shag now.”

He pressed a kiss to her temple. “All right.” 

She twisted in his arms, sat up, and turned so she could get a look at him: her husband for the night. He held still, offering himself up for her gaze—what a change from a week ago, when he hadn’t even wanted to undress. He wasn’t Ingeborg, but he was long-limbed and clever-fingered, readily instructed, an avid kisser, and those weren’t nothing. “You’ll do,” Val said. Loki chuckled. He was still smiling as she straddled his thighs, slung her arms around his neck, and caught his mouth with hers.

His kisses were hungrier now than they’d been two days ago: the kisses, perhaps, of someone who’d finally gotten a taste of the feast. His hands roamed freely up and down her back, cupping her arse, skimming up her sides just the right way to make her shiver. A familiar, delicious heat began to pool between Val’s thighs, thrumming through her clit. “Fuck,” she said in relief. This was what she needed now, Loki’s middling warmth and sure hands and startled whimper of arousal when she tugged on his lip with her teeth. 

The second time she did that, Loki said, “Oh.” It was that same odd tone from before. Val pulled back and let Loki consider his prick, which had gotten interested all on its own, untouched. Carefully he wrapped his fingers around himself. He shivered, and his prick stiffened a little more. “Thank you,” he said, very quietly.

Val wanted to punch something—or someone, more like. There were no manners she knew of for this situation except the most basic of all. “You’re welcome,” she said. “You want to put it in me?”

“Yes?” Loki said, sharp and wide-eyed and hungry: the look she’d been waiting all night for. 

He wasn’t quite ready yet, but he set to getting himself there. He let her watch this time. He was fast learning what felt good, how quickly and firmly to stroke, how to grip himself. The first time he made himself gasp, he flushed a sudden bright red. It was cute.

When he was getting close, Val said, “Now?” He nodded jerkily. Val shoved up onto her knees, gripped his shoulders for balance, and positioned herself over him. She lowered herself until the tip of his prick was brushing against her cunt. Loki’s breath was coming in gasps. And then, inch by careful inch—with an occasional pause to let Loki hold himself together—Val sank down onto him.

“Fuck,” Loki breathed.

He was a tight fit. Val liked a good prick now and again, but it’d been a long time. Val breathed in, breathed out, settling into that full feeling. “How we doing?” she asked.

“Good,” Loki said shortly. He closed his hands around her waist and stared up at her in a daze. She bent and kissed him because she could. Then she pushed slowly up, savoring the drag of Loki’s prick in her, and sank again. Loki’s breath turned harsher. He wouldn’t last long. 

“I want to come with you in me,” Val said. The words alone made Loki groan, and for moment Val thought she was going to have missed her chance. But he held himself together, and she dropped a hand to her clit. Loki pulled her close enough that he could put his mouth to her nipple, sparking pleasure all the way down. 

Val quit thinking at all until that ever-more urgent heat in her gut tipped over.

After, Loki was breathing nearly as hard as she. She settled into the hard, short work of riding him. He held her hips and watched her, his gaze wide and awed, until at last his face screwed shut and he came with a satisfying, punched-out exhale.

They were both sweaty and gasping. Val climbed shakily off him and slumped against the wall. She’d want to clean up in a bit, but for the moment she was satisfied to sit there with her knees drawn up, one foot tucked under Loki’s thigh, and watch him slowly draw himself back together. Eventually, because she was pretty sure she knew the answer, she said, “Worth going through all this nonsense for?”

Loki’s grin was wide and full of bullshit. All the many moments of awkwardness and discomfort and shame she’d seen in him in the last week seemed washed away. “It’s a beginning,” he said.

Val kicked his knee. Then she kicked it again when he started laughing. He was still laughing when she crawled off the bed and went to clean herself up.

She came back to find him dozing, but he stirred a little when she curled up against him. He tugged the blanket over them both, and then, belatedly, Val called the command to turn out the light. In the dark, her face pressed to his chest, she could say, “Thank you, too. I know it wasn’t on purpose, but this was—it was good.”

Loki draped his arm over waist and pulled her in a little closer. “Good.”

It took her a little while to say the next thing. If he’d already fallen asleep, well, no matter. They’d go get unmarried tomorrow—Thor knew to expect them—and this’d be the end of it. She said, “Did you have someone in mind, after this? Or some kind of plan? Go spend a few months on Pink, getting fucked every which way?” 

But Loki was not asleep. He shifted a little. “Not really. It just—it seemed time. Why?”

Val nosed at that little trail of chest hair. Loki squirmed; it must have tickled. “I was just thinking, the married sex was pretty good. We could wait a little while dissolving the marriage. Do it next week.”

Loki was silent so long Val thought he really had fallen asleep. Finally, he said, “We could hold hands at the council meeting. Thor would be thrilled.”

Val could imagine the exact pained face Thor would make, because he’d already been making it through most of the wedding ceremony. “Korg, too.”

“He’ll want to organize some kind of celebration,” Loki said with a chuckle. “Surely that’s sufficient reason for a marriage. Amusement and—and sex.”

But wasn’t it? For a week, at least. Val could enjoy being married to Loki Odinson for a week, and then—well. They could decide on ‘then’ when they came to it. “We can sleep on it,” she said. Loki hummed. He sounded as if he was slipping away at last. It was easy to follow him. 

The last thing she heard was the creak of some strut or support against another: the sound of the station coming to terms with itself.

[end]


End file.
